With the development of a wireless local area network (Wireless Local Area Network, WLAN), a user equipment tracing method is widely used as an important means of fault diagnosis and network optimization.
In the prior art, a tracing task for a user equipment is generally started by presetting a MAC address of the user equipment on an access controller (AC), and signaling that is related to the user equipment and exchanged between the AC and an Access Point (AP), exchanged between the AC and an AAA server (Authentication, Authorization, Accounting, AAA), and exchanged between the AC and a WEB authentication server (Portal) is traced. However, signaling that is related to the user equipment and terminated at an AP cannot be traced by using the AC, and tracing of the signaling that is related to the user equipment and terminated at the AP needs to be triggered by using the AP.
In a practical application, however, a user equipment frequently switches APs, and in order to implement tracing of signaling that is related to the user equipment and terminated at the AP, signaling tracing needs to be preset for the user equipment on each AP one by one. Therefore, an existing user equipment tracing method for tracing user signaling terminated at an AP has a problem of low efficiency.